Don't be fooled into seeing 'Deception'

Wednesday

The greatest deception in “Deception” is the fact that it’s billed as a thriller. I sat through it. It’s not.

The greatest deception in “Deception” is the fact that it’s billed as a thriller. I sat through it. It’s not.

Nothing is what it seems and what it seems is nothing; just one immense gasbag of unsexy sex and inert action meshing into yet another soulless exercise in flash trumping substance.

If looks could kill, though, “Deception” would be deadly, especially with its double-barreled hunks — Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor — rubbing shoulders (and other body parts) against the seductively gorgeous Michelle Williams.

They’re more appetizing than a glazed doughnut with jimmies as they flaunt their assets in a brazen attempt to divert your attention from a script that sets new lows in vapidity.

It’s like deja vu all over again watching Mark Bomback’s hackneyed plot unfold in steady, overly measured beats, as the proverbial lonely, sexless rube (McGregor) is taken under the wing of a devil incarnate with an irresistibly unctuous smile.

That would be Jackman, of course, and as he proved in the vastly superior “The Prestige,” he is good at playing evil — maybe a little too good, especially when the role cries for an actor to play his cards a little closer to the vest.

When he’s on screen, which is not nearly enough, “Deception” rises a notch or two above its normal state of awfulness. He’s so charming; in fact, you secretly wish he’d do away with McGregor’s neutered nebbish ASAP and seize the movie for himself.

And why not? His character, the enigmatic Wyatt Bose, is infinitely more intriguing than McGregor’s Jonathan McQuarry, a man without friends, lovers or a personality. He’s the human equivalent of white paint, and he never adds any color, even when the most rote of plot twists — the cell phone switch — allows him the opportunity to become Wyatt for a few days while the real Wyatt is presumably off on business in London.

We, and Eliot Spitzer, should be so lucky, as Jonathan discovers once he answers Wyatt’s cell and an anonymous woman breathes lasciviously into the phone, “Are you free tonight?”

Turns out Wyatt, a high-powered New York attorney, is up to his belt buckle in sexually starved Wall Street career women who phone him whenever they want to get into his legal briefs. So Jonathan does what any nerdy CPA with bad hair and drippy glasses would do — he fulfills their pleasures in Wyatt’s place.

It’s through these seemingly nightly liaisons that Jonathan eventually meets Williams, whose character goes simply by “S.” She’s blonde and vulnerable, just the way stupid, gullible men like their femme fatales. But do they stand a chance of going anywhere in a film that goes nowhere?

The whole thing is relentlessly predictable, even as murder and blackmail are added to the implausible plot. Then we’re headed for an anticlimactic showdown on the cobbled streets of Madrid.

First-time director Marcel Langenegger does nothing to help his cause. He delivers one tedious scene after another. Even the sex is lifeless.

At least he’s made a funny film, even if that wasn’t his intention. Get a load of the scene in which Williams clutches a tiny plastic duck in her palm as she laments what might have been.

I couldn’t stop laughing. And that just might be “Deception’s” ultimate ruse, a comedy disguised as thriller masquerading as entertainment. Sorry, but I’m not falling for it.